I agree fully, articles on keeping and breeding were the mainstay of
early issues, nothing but for the most part. These days they are pretty
rare. How do we encourage people to write? Maybe we need to offer a
discount membership for their next years subscription if they get one or
more articles accepted for publication? I think this is an important
issue that would be good to get more feedback from. Anyone got any good
suggestions?
I'm sure the most common response is "I don't really know much about it",
or "my writing skills aren't very good". Yunno, all you need to do is
write down what you observe, what you did, what your experiences have
been. You don't have to have kept and bred a species for 10 years before
you can write about it. The editorial folks can help with writing
skills.
It would be interesting to analyse the authorship and nature of articles
that have appeared in the journal over the years. How many authors do we
really have? Hansen would have to be 40-50%, Leggett, Crockford,
Armstrong, Bowman have all done several articles and probably account for
over 80% of all articles published. You'd probably call me a
"conservationist" (as well as other more colourful things), but all three
of my articles have contained aquarium care as well as natural history
information. :-)
> I don't believe that there is a TRUE
> Conservationist anywhere, most just pay lip service to the ideals of
> conservationism or are radicals looking for a flag to fly while others jump
> on the bandwagon because it has become fashionably to belong to a
> conservation group.
I think there are some people out there who work very hard to achieve
their ideals, but you're right, most folks are just along for the ride.
Tootles
Peter Unmack